OnTime 13 is Here!

I’m excited to announce that we have released OnTime 13 for OnDemand customers (and will be releasing it for OnPremises customers this Friday). It’s a tremendous upgrade that adds lots of new features and fine tunes others. Here are my favorite features:

My most favorite feature is the new “Card View” that replaces our Visual Planning Board. It looks like this:

The new Card View is an order of magnitude more powerful than the Visual Planning Board that it replaces. Cards are more compact allowing more cards to fit on the screen. Group headers now provide much more detailed information about the status of the cards in a given group. You can also filter the cards by project, release or assignee using the standard organization panel on the left. Drag-and-drop to reassign cards to different releases, projects, sprints and team members. If you expand the details section, you can even see the details of the currently selected card including description, attachments, work logs and more. The new Card View works exactly like the super powerful grid view did and that’s what makes it a lot more powerful than before.

Stack Ranking

With OnTime 13 we are also introducing a new Stack Ranking feature where you can drag-and-drop items to re-order how they appear. Since you can sort view items by any field in OnTime, stack ranking in OnTime is essentially another sort order. You can view your list by Stack Rank sort order and of course, you can drop into “Ranking Mode” to re-arrange the stack. It looks like this:

Once an item is stack ranked, the ranking of the item is maintained regardless of what group of items are viewed within OnTime. So you can stack rank the entire V5.0 release or just Sprint 3. Either way, the items that get ranked maintain their rank as you move up or down the release tree. When viewing items sorted by stack rank mode, you can also group them by other fields such as Assignee so that you can see all the items assigned to a particular person stack ranked appropriately.

Release-Based Security

A lot of you have been asking about release-based security and filtering releases based on what projects a user has access to. We can’t believe we lived this long without this feature. Now that we’ve been using it internally, we can’t live without it.

Here’s how Release-Based Security/Filtering works. For each of your Projects, you can assign which Products from your releases tree are associated with the project. This is done from a new tab in the Edit Project screen:

Once you’ve said which products/releases belong to a particular project, OnTime will do the rest. Each time you select a project, only the appropriate releases that are associated with that project are shown. If a user doesn’t have access to a particular project, then they can’t see the releases associated with that project branch. It’s super simple and works extremely well. It’s nice to have your releases tree filtered down to just the releases from the project you are looking at.

Lots of Other Stuff

There’s lots of other stuff too. Like the update to the Security UI, new REST APIs (documented at developer.ontimenow.com) and better help options inside the product. So check it out and let us know what you think.